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Baton Rouge area business leaders 'enact' huge smash at TEDxLSU

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Some of Baton Rouge's top business leaders gathered with community trailblazers and gave the "talk of their lives" at the annual TEDx LSU event, presenting innovative ideas and efforts to "enact" change in Louisiana, the effects thereof.
(Chelsea Brasted, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

Some of Baton Rouge's top business leaders gathered with
community trailblazers and gave the "talk of their lives" at the annual TEDxLSU event,
presenting innovative ideas and efforts to "enact" change in Louisiana. As promised by TEDxLSU curator Joey Watson,
this year's event was more of an orchestrated theatrical production: Some
speakers brought props with them on the stage of the Claude L. Shaver Theatre in LSU's Music & Dramatic Arts Building, while others used multimedia to help
with their lecture.

TED Talks, the popular lecture series, usually examines unique or profound ideas. The "x" in TEDx
denotes an offshoot of that series.

Last year's lecturers spoke
around the "evolve" theme. While
there were 24 speakers in 2013, this year featured 15 who spoke during three
sessions, each running an hour long.

What ideas resonated the most for you? Did you
disagree with any of the lecturers? Tell us why in the comments below.

Here are some highlights:

Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen
Moret revered Louisiana as a state with an unrivaled petrochemical corridor and
a bold business community. With unprecedented growth coming to the
Pelican State in the next few years, after 15 new project were announced in 2013, Moret said the state is not yet ready for the purported
growth rate of 40,000 new jobs annually. He insisted talent, regional and
industry development will be the three vital keys to successfully preparing for
the years ahead, in addition to empowering individuals at the most local
levels.

Physician Leone Elliot said anyone can do what Og Mandino, author of The Greatest Salesmen in the World said of himself: "I will persist until I succeed." This described Elliot, who eventually came to a consensus of the conflict between his dream, which was to be an architecture, and his
passion, which was purely to help people. As a physician, he said he relegated
his love for art to the paintings on the wall of his office. But through his quest to combine
medicine, fine art and architecture he created the Healthcare Gallery, a Baton
Rouge clinic that serves as an art gallery, yoga studio and medical innovation
hub. "I set out to create an art gallery that could service patients. ... My
deliberate intent was that medicine would always take a back seat to art." Elliot uses his creative space to help motivate his patients to stay healthy and to set a new health standard. He persisted, and succeeded, and said anyone could do the same, too.

Garret Graves, former chair of the Coastal Protection
and Restoration Authority of Louisiana and now a candidate for Congress, said that with its rich history, food and
entertainment, Louisiana holds treasures one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere
else in the world. But the Bayou State has a limited amount of time, if multiple resources don't combine to reverse the disappearing
footprint along the coast. He explained that in a state where the good times
roll, there's also a devastating side, a harsh dose of reality that came along
with hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After the disasters, Graves said, the state
lost more than 25 miles of its coast. Furthermore, "over the last 80 years, the
state has lost about 1,900 miles of coast. ... We may lose 1,750 miles over the next
20 years." However he said the trend is not relegated to coastal communities, that the rest of the country is in danger as well.
Graves insists government, community and environmental and coastal officials should
combine "to ensure other communities don't experience or go through the deaths
or disasters that we've gone through."

Closing out the event with a "smash," IBM talent development manager Dima Ghawi challenged the audience: "What limitations are you dealing with? What's keeping you from living
your dream?" Sharing her experience as a young bride who grew up in a culture
of tight restraints on women, she likened young girls to a glass vase that, if
cracked, shows all of her mistakes and insecurities. Ghawi said she lived her
life according to the strict cultural restraints but, age 25, "I
realized I had a choice: I could live satisfying everyone around me or not. I
chose me." So she got a divorce from a controlling marriage and, starting from scratch, set out to learn who she was. She evolved into the woman who she wanted to be, helped by a graduate school professor who started her on the path to leadership
with a simple suggestion: Run for student body president. She won. "We allow
these limitations to inhibit us, not knowing we could have broken them all
along," she said. "So I smashed the vase."